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How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

eidel.io

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Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#901
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The impression I got from the last time I was in Germany (some ~7 years ago), there's a going concern among at least some people that a certain ethnicity of immigrants is "taking over". This might be a pearl-clutching minority, or I may have completely misread the situation.

There seems to be a growing frustration about asylum seekers who moved to Germany and did not adopt German values, a theme you will find in every country. It's scary because the party that complains the most about it is gaining traction, and it convinces centrist parties to change their stance on immigration. It's not a pearl-clutching minority anymore, but a politically advantageous position. As an immigrant, I feel…

> There seems to be a growing frustration about asylum seekers who moved to Germany and did not adopt German values, a theme you will find in every country.

I'd like to see white, christians or atheists, germans move to some of the countries those asylum seekers are coming from and see how they'd be treated.

Then we can discuss if it's the same in every country.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#902
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll one up you and say that it's so broken, there are lots of people that basically live on ranges of exceptions. In my case, I was told I was not eligible for the visa I needed but when I spoke to a migration consultant who knew the process, they managed to get it done. I was pretty shocked as this wink, wink, nod, nod style system is not something I expected from this country.

Yes, bureaucrats can act as gatekeepers for things that you are legally entitled to, and create various bureaucratic hurdles. It's usually mere thoroughness, sometimes incompetence, and if you cross them, vindictiveness. I was told more than once by very knowledgeable people that if you anger a case worker, they can and will make your life hard by nitpicking every little detail and asking for as many documents as the…

This is so true . There is a word for it in German… behördenwillkür. Mean they can do with you as they please. Advocate insurance is a must here. I hate the bureaucracy here. Lawyers are the only help

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#903
post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html Dankeschön. If I'm reading this right (I may not be, see previous comment: I am not an economist), half of the revenue is spend on social security: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/... This is weirdly out of date, I don't know why the link was to a URL from 2013 whose content is about 2017, but it says fo…

Social security is also the budget to allocate the money. It’s ridiculous expensive in Germany. For example. 3 billion is spent on jobless people… half of that goes to burocracy.

Half of 3 billion is 1.5 billion.

There's 2.713 million unemployed.

552.89 euros per person per… year? Even per month that does not seem unreasonable.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=€1.5+billion%2F2.713+mi...

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today. It's not the costs that have rise sharply, it's the revenue and taxes that have declined since WW2 due to increased competition from globalization and the offshoring of jobs abroad, plus tax heavens aiding big corporation avoid paying taxes locally in western european countries, meaning governments today are missing out on…

I don't know of that's the cause, but it could be an interesting theory to look into. But taking job offshoring, as an example. It could be fairly straightforward to determine how much tax revenue a car produced in, say, Germany, contributes to the economy, vs the same car imported from abroad. But where it gets complicated is that, German unemployment being low, the worker that lost his or her job to offshoring didn…

* >So what is the loss?*

Less bargaining Power and less wages therefore less revenue for the state and spending power for the people.

Decades ago a factory worker could support a family. That's not the case anymore.

Offshoring doesn't automatically result in mass unemployment.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#905

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's vastly overstating how bad it is. Maybe it's different if you are a German citizen. Just as an example, I never did anything other than signing the contract to get a job. I filled in a single form for each of my two kids when they were born. We got the forms in the hospital and just left them there. Similarly for registering a car -- there was a single simple form.

I disagree. This is not in any way overstating the state of things. Have you ever changed cities and needed to change Finanzbehörde? Have you ever registered for driving school? Have you ever tried changing from one driving instructor to another? Have you ever got married in a district where there are no appointments for marriage? Have you ever been unable to take your children out of school to attend a family funera…

When I was in school, we went to Spain on a vacation that cut a bit into school days (= after the end of the school vacation). So my mom told the teacher, and it was fine. The teacher said the holiday will be a lifetime memory and great learning experience, too.

However, I read several more recent stories where parents in the UK got into trouble (had to pay fine, or got in contact with the police) because their kid did not attend a few school days, but with the parent's consent.

Both countries have mandatory school laws.

> In my experience what is most amazing is how most citizens of this country just accept this and don't find it unusual.

Most Germans are obedient to authority, which seems one of the main reasons why the holocaust could happen (read about Milgram's 1961 obedience experiments worldwide, Munich "scored" top on this sad metric).

Also, people that have only lived in one country don't know it any other way. Perhaps everyone should move to Estonia for a year to open eyes...

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#906
post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get married in Denmark: This not a joke, but my friends did it (German woman, Indian husband). It Germany it would have taken two weeks. In Denmark you get it done in an hour (minus the booking of the time at the civil registry).

These are the cases which Germany wants to avoid: "Scheinehe", where people get paid to marry and give the other person an "Aufenthalts- und Arbeitserlaubnis" -> allowed to stay and work in Germany. There is quite a business around this.

Ironically, on the one hand, the government views marriage officially as a "contract"; on the other hand, if it is "just a contract" between two consenting adults, then it is considered fraud! It makes little sense.

I think it is outrageous for a government to allege, or even just to investigate, particular causes for marriage unless one of the parties was coerced into it rather than wanting it out of their own free will.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for sure it could be much better in Germany, and I hope that rapidly becomes the case. Definitely digitization needs to come faster. My complaint is simply people imagining it is perfect elsewhere. Really that is not the case, no where is perfect. All the people chiming in about the US being so easy, yes, wonderful. Now let's talk about healthcare and how your health insurance is tied to your employer. Everyone wh…

> Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though. A part of the argument for Brexit was to enable simplifications of bureaucracy (obviously not for the specific case of someone in the EU migrating there, but for everything else). So that's not necessarily a great argument. It hasn't been capitalized on to any great extent yet because the current government is weak and…

The UK's big opportunity was: to be the "best" EU country by having the most reasonable (informal, common-sense based) interpretation of EU rules permissible, and to benefit from intra-EU trade and freedom of movement.

This opportunity was sadly squandered due to populism (and Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica financed by Rob Mercer), with the result that now tons of migration from India and other Asian places is arranged to fill the gaps that the European workers that left created.

So let's see how life will be at the front doorstop of the EU of which it isn't a member anymore, say, in 10 year's time, compared to how it was 2016. From what my journalist friends are telling me, for once food theft has skyrocketed, because many cannot pay their grocery bills.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#908

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp) Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut. We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better educati…

But maybe those experts should've been raising alarm over this? Western Europe is doing pretty poorly when it comes to economic growth. And prior to that Germany got a lot of help from the US, Spain did not do well, Italy was questionable, Portugal did not do well. Netherlands did well, but a lot of it is down to their location as a place for trade. That only leaves France and Belgium. Did they do well? > We've been…

> That only leaves France and Belgium. Did they do well?

Looking at France and the quality of their industrial output in the 70s to 90s, ranging from high-speed trains, rockets, passenger airplanes, Concorde, helicopters, (racing) cars, submarines, nuclear power plants, medical labs, etc. I would say yes. Their infrastructure has also been of high quality, so has the education system of their elites, and their healthcare.

And from what I could see of Belgium and their infrastructure, it also looked like that period was good for them.

> Modern healthcare is better than anything before. Even in its dysfunctional state it is better.

This is a more relevant point. The question is if we aren't well past a point of diminishing returns. For instance, for France, the data shows that the life expectancy of women was increasing by 2 years every 10 years, until 2010. It has increased by 0.5 years since then. The life expectancy of men followed a similar trend.

In fact, we might not have seen the full effect dysfunctional health care just yet, and we could be riding on the momentum of previous gains. And the ever increasing delays to see a specialist can only have detrimental effects in the long term. In parallel, the disproportionate increase of healthcare costs per patients means that, at some point, life expectancy is going to go down.

> One of the reasons is that our requirements for those services are much higher leading to much higher inherent costs.

No, I don't think I agree. The house you are getting has not improved 3 fold in quality compared to 20 years ago. The roads you are driving on are not 2 times better. Train travel is not a lot safer, nor faster, nor with more frequent service. On the contrary. The food quality in your supermarket has not improved. The electricity you use still has the same voltage and the same frequency. The clothes you wear are not of higher quality.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#909
post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social security is also the budget to allocate the money. It’s ridiculous expensive in Germany. For example. 3 billion is spent on jobless people… half of that goes to burocracy.

Half of 3 billion is 1.5 billion. There's 2.713 million unemployed. 552.89 euros per person per… year? Even per month that does not seem unreasonable. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=€1.5+billion%2F2.713+mi...

It’s per month… sadly.

1.5billion per month is the salary of 300.000 office worker. So Germany needs 1 person to manage 10 persons … so why the fuck does it take 3-6 month until they reply ? It’s , here the end of contract and give me money till I have a new job or for max a year.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#910
post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any reason you think so or are you just not paying attention? Far-right sentiment is rising in the US by any metric.

I belong to an ethnic minority in Germany and had real Nazis, not Neo-Nazis, as neighbors growing up. Just because you don't know how racist the average German views are, doesn't mean it isn't so. - CDU, which is politically the closest to the Republicans, is by far the strongest party now - AFD, actual Neo-Nazis, are the second strongest party in recent polls - East Germany is basically a giant No-Go area for PoC, w…

I appreciate the actual response! I'd like to point out that I didn't say that Germany doesn't have racists or Nazis - as a matter of fact, I'm well aware of this, and in particular I'm aware of the rising popularity of AfD. I don't like this and I won't defend those groups in any way. But I don't think I'm wrong stating that we have more Nazis, unless you're going to be a stickler about which white supremacists are and are not Nazis.

- The US Republican Party is far right and going farther. The Democratic party is also on the right. There are basically zero federal politicians on the left, the best you can get is basically center.

- We had an attack on our federal capitol building three years ago by white supremacists. Nazis carrying flags with the hakenkreuz marched on the Tennessee state capitol about six weeks ago. The number of groups like this is rising swiftly, even the police are in on it.

- We have done very little to stop this, we even had our previous president praising them. It's an embarrassment to our country, honestly. We were so proud to have beaten the Axis powers in WWII - and now we're going down the same path.

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